The Big Game: What Corporations Are Learning About the Human Brain « The Situationist

As I stake out my position on the couch this evening – close enough to reach the pretzels and my beer, but with an optimal view of the TV – it will be nice to imagine that the spectacle about to unfold is a sporting event.It shouldn’t be too hard: after all, there on the screen will be the field, Brian Urlacher stretching out his quads, Peyton Manning tossing a football, referees in their freshly-starched zebra uniforms milling about.Yes, I’ll think to myself, this has all the makings of a football game. How foolish. The Super Bowl isn’t about sports; it’s about making money.And with 90 million or so viewers, there is a lot of money to be made. With CBS charging an estimated $2.6 million for each 30-second advertising spot, it’s no surprise that corporations don’t mess around with guessing what the most effective approach will be for selling their products.They call in the scientists.brain-on-advertising.jpg For the second year in a row, FKF Applied Research has partnered with the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, to “measure the effect of many of the Super Bowl ads by using fMRI technology.

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Don't let market research myopia distract you from innovation - Jim Clemmer - Innovation Tools

Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking, and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or - even worse - commodity products and services that compete only on price.

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Reflections Using Arts Based Processes when Working with Centers of Excellence - Linda Naiman, Creativity At Work

Over the past year I have been invited by some of the largest and most successful companies in the world to introduce the arts as a catalyst for developing creativity, leadership and innovation within the organization. I’ve been working within specific business units of these global organizations, and I would describe these units as centers of excellence with an entrepreneurial appetite for creativity, innovation and the willingness to try something new. I’ve noticed the leaders who run these business units, track what’s on the leading edge, and invite “best of breed” to learn from. This approach, combined with sufficient resources, and sound-management practices, contributes to creating a culture that fosters innovation as well as excellence in business performance.

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Time to Retire Strategic Planning and Adopt Innovation Strategy - Kamal Hassan

It’s almost that time of year again. Strategic planning teams all over the world will gather behind closed doors in a vain attempt to predict the future – except for the visionary ones who are saying “Enough!” They have realized that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is, well, simply crazy. Remember the first James Bond movie you ever saw? Regardless of who was playing 007, you couldn’t help but be swept up as he outgunned and outsmarted the bad guys and saved the day. Now think of the last James Bond movie you saw. Did it give you the same thrill? Or did you almost fall asleep? It’s not the actor, or the mind-numbing car chases and explosions to blame. It’s the fact that we’ve seen it all before, year after year, we know how it ends. We’re left feeling vaguely unsatisfied, hoping for something more substantial.

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How Companies Develop Great Leaders - Summary of Hays Consulting Leadership Research 2009

At first glance, Zappos.com, the online retailer, appears to have little in common with General Electric (GE), the multinational conglomerate. Hit hard by the recession, GE is in the throes of scaling down its financial services subsidiary, GE Capital, by an estimated 40%. Zappos, on the other hand, is tapping into changing consumer habits and ramping up for 30% growth over the next 12 months. Yet surprisingly, these two organizations with their rapidly shifting environments face similar challenges in motivating and engaging their employees. For Zappos, it's about creating and maintaining passion in a call-center culture. For GE, it's about keeping people engaged in a changing climate. Named among the 20 Best Companies for Leadership in a recent BusinessWeek.com/Hay Group survey, both GE and Zappos put a premium on

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